One Foot in Eden (2 page)

I pulled off the road when I came to Roy Whitmire’s store, parking beside the sign that said LAST CHANCE FOR GAS TWENTY MILES. I stepped past men sitting on Cheerwine and Double Cola crates. With their bald heads and wrinkled necks they looked like mud turtles sunning on stumps. The men gave me familiar nods, but the dog days had sapped the talk out of them. I swirled my hand in the drink cooler on the porch, ice and water numbing my fingers before I found a six-ounce bottle. I wasn’t thirsty, but it wasn’t right not to buy something. I stepped inside, into a big room that was darker than outside but no cooler.

The store was pretty much the way it had always been, the front shelf filled with everything from Eagle Claw fish hooks to Goody headache powders, a big jar on the counter, pickled eggs in the murky brine pressed against the glass like huge eyeballs. Next to the cash register another jar, this one filled with black licorice whips.

‘Howdy, stranger,’ Roy said, grinning as he stepped from around the counter to shake my hand.

We made small talk a few minutes. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw the stuffed bobcat on the back wall—paw poised to strike, yellow eyes glaring—still at bay after three decades. Fifty-pound sacks of Dekalb corn seed lay stacked on the floor below it.

‘I don’t reckon you’ve seen Holland Winchester the last couple of days?’ I finally said, getting to the reason I’d stopped.

‘No,’ Roy said. ‘Of course I ain’t exactly been out searching for him. I got enough trouble that’s already found me without looking for more.’

Roy lifted the nickel I’d placed on the counter, leaving the penny where it lay.

‘Buffalo head,’ he said, holding the nickel between us. ‘You don’t see many of them anymore. They done got near scarce as real buffalo. You sure you don’t want to keep it?’

‘No,’ I said.

Roy closed the register.

‘Your daddy and brother, they’re seeing a hard time of it, like most everybody with something in the ground. That ain’t no good news for them or me.’

Roy nodded toward the shelf behind him.

‘I got a shoebox full of credit tickets. If it don’t come a good rain soon I’d just as well use them to start my fires this winter. But you don’t have to worry about such things down in town, do you?’

‘No, I guess not.’

I lay the Coke bottle on the counter.

‘You telephone me if Holland comes by.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Roy said. ‘You bring me one of your voting posters next time you’re up this way. I’ll put it in the window.’

Before I got in my car I glanced at the sky. Like it mattered to me, a man with a certain paycheck come rain or drought.

A mile from the North Carolina line I turned off the blacktop and headed into the valley called Jocassee. The word meant ‘valley of the lost’ to the Cherokee, for a princess named Jocassee had once drowned herself here and her body had never been found. The road I followed had once been a trail, a trail De Soto had followed four hundred years ago when he’d searched these mountains for gold. De Soto and his men had found no riches and believed the land worthless for raising corn. Two centuries after De Soto, the Frenchman Michaux would find something here rarer than gold, a flower that existed nowhere else in the world.

I took another right and passed fields where men once hid horses during what folks up here still spoke of as the Confederate War. A war most folks in Jocassee had tried to stay out of, believing it was the slave owners’ war, not theirs. When they’d been forced to choose, many had fought with the Union instead of the Confederacy, including several of my ancestors. Though I’d tried, there weren’t enough votes in Jocassee to get the county to pave the road or even dump a few truckloads of gravel. Like almost everything else up here, the road was little different than it had been in the 1860s. But change was coming, a change big enough to swallow this whole valley.

On the road’s left side was the land Carolina Power had bought from the timber company last winter, a thousand acres that ran all the way down to the Horsepasture River. The power company already had holdings on the other side of the water, and I doubted there was anyone left up here who didn’t now know what Carolina Power was going to do to this valley.

It wasn’t hard to figure out. All you had to do was look downstate at Santee-Cooper Reservoir. People up here wouldn’t like it worth a damn to be run off their land, but when the time came there would be nothing they could do about it.

The road curved and dipped deeper into the valley. I passed my brother Travis’s house and then the house I’d grown up in. Daddy worked in the far field, the dust plumes rising behind his tractor telling the whole story of the kind of year it looked to be.

The land leveled out. I smelled the river, but the road swerved left before I saw water. Branches slapped my windshield as I bumped over a road now no better than a logger’s skid trail. I stopped at the battered mailbox with WINCHESTER painted on its side. I turned in and parked behind a blue Ford truck new as the telephone line that ran out of the woods. Holland was right. He’d done his portion of the killing Uncle Sam had sent him to do. A truck and telephone had been part of his reward.

Mrs. Winchester sat on her front porch. I knew she’d been there a while, waiting for Holland or me to show up. I took off my hat and stepped onto the porch. I remembered seeing her when I was a boy and thinking how pretty she’d been with her long, black hair, her eyes dark as mahogany wood. She couldn’t be more than fifty-two or three, but her hair was gray as squirrel fur now, her face furrowed like an overworked field. Only her eyes looked the same, deep brown like her son’s.

Those eyes didn’t blink when she spoke. Except for her mouth, her face was so rigid it could have been on a daguerreotype.

‘He’s dead,’ Mrs. Winchester said. ‘My boy is dead.’

There was such finality in her voice I expected her to get up and lead me to Holland’s body.

‘How do you know that?’ I asked when she didn’t say or do anything else.

‘I heard the shot. I didn’t think nothing of it at first but when Holland didn’t come in for his noon-dinner I knew it certain as I’m sitting on this here porch.’

Her face didn’t change, but for the first time grief and anger tinged her voice.

‘Billy Holcombe’s done killed my boy.’

‘Why would Billy Holcombe want to do such a thing?’

She didn’t answer that question, didn’t even try to. Ten years of experience told me there was more wouldn’t answer than couldn’t answer in her silence.

I looked at some corn planted close to the house. A scarecrow leaned like a drunk above the puny stalks. The hat and straw that had shaped the seed-sack face lay on the ground. It didn’t matter. The drought had already taken anything the crows would want.

‘When’s the last time you seen Holland?’ I asked, meeting her eyes again.

‘This morning. I went out to feed the chickens. I come back and he was gone.’

‘And nobody came and picked him up?’

‘No, I’d a heard it if they’d of done so.’

‘And Holland didn’t say he was off to anywhere?’

‘You go see Billy Holcombe,’ Mrs. Winchester said. ‘He’s the one knows where Holland is.’

Her eyes were stern and righteous, but I knew she wasn’t telling me everything. For a moment I wondered if maybe she had done something to Holland, but that didn’t seem likely. Everything I’d learned as a law man told me a mother who’d killed her grown child would have already confessed. She could have no more carried that burden inside her than I could have carried a baby inside me. What seemed likely was what Bobby had said. Holland was passed out somewhere drunk, someplace pretty close by since he hadn’t taken his truck.

‘I know the Holcombes is some kin to you,’ Mrs. Winchester said, and she let that hang in the air between us.

‘If he’s went and done something against the law that’ll make no difference,’ I said, slipping more and more into the way of speaking I’d grown up with.

I put my hat back on.

‘I’m going to have me a look around. I’ll walk the river a ways and I’ll go see Billy Holcombe, but I ain’t accusing nobody of nothing yet. If Holland hasn’t showed by morning I’ll get a serious search going.’

‘He ain’t coming back,’ Mrs. Winchester said.

She got up from the chair and went inside.

I walked down to a river that drought had made more dry stones than water. A current that would have knocked a man down in April was now a trickle. I limped across the shore of rocks as I followed the river downstream. I shouted Holland’s name every so often, using what wind I had in my one good lung. But even if he wasn’t passed out drunk, he’d have a hard time hearing me. Cicadas filled the trees, loud and unceasing as a cotton mill’s weave room.

I straddled a barbed wire fence and stepped onto Billy Holcombe’s land, land Billy had bought years back from Mrs. Winchester’s husband. I wondered if that had something to do with why I was up here—an argument over a boundary line. Plenty of blood had been spilled over such matters in Oconee County. But I was getting way ahead of myself. I didn’t even have a body yet.

Billy’s tobacco pressed up close to the river. His rows were tight, no more than two feet apart., which meant more yield but the cultivating had to be done by hand. It was a good crop, bright green and tall, nothing like the tobacco in the fields I’d seen earlier. The river had saved him, soaking the soil so well in spring the roots still got moisture. Come fall he might be one of the few farmers in Jocassee with anything to cure in a tobacco barn.

Billy Holcombe hoed at the opposite end of the row where I stood, Cousin Billy, though a good ways back. He was a good bit younger than me, so I hadn’t known him growing up, but I’d known his parents and older sister. All I remembered of him was that the first year I’d been down at Clemson College he’d gotten polio.

His being the only person in Jocassee to get polio hadn’t been surprising, at least to the Holcombes’ neighbors. Bad luck followed his people like some mangy hound they couldn’t run off. His granddaddy and uncle had both owned farms at one time but lost them and ended up sharecropping for the Winchesters. They hadn’t been trifling men. They’d worked hard and didn’t drink, but it seemed the hail always fell hardest on the Holcombes’ crops. If lightning hit a barn in Jocassee or blackleg killed a cow, it most always belonged to a Holcombe.

Billy’s back was to me. The cicadas sang so loud he probably hadn’t heard me calling Holland’s name. I waited for him to finish his row, remembering how it felt to hoe tobacco—how the sweat stung your eyes and your back stayed bent so long you felt by day’s end you’d need a crowbar to straighten yourself. I remembered how palms got rough as sandpaper and the back of your neck got red as brick and you’d get to the end of one row and keep your head down like a mule wearing blinders because you didn’t want to see how many more of those long rows you had left.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was knowing no matter how hard you worked, it might come to nothing. Even if the weather spared your crop, and that was a big if, you still had root knot and blue mold to worry about, not to mention bud worms and tobacco worms.

Billy’s tobacco looked healthy, but even so he wasn’t home free yet. The hardest work came at harvest time. The tobacco gum turned your hands and arms brown as it stuck to your skin like pine resin. You had to string the leaves onto tobacco sticks and hang the sticks in the barn to cure. Even then a lightning strike or cigarette could set the barn on fire, and in five minutes nine months’ work would be nothing but smoke and ashes.

Billy Holcombe knew all this better than I did, because it wasn’t memory for him. It was as much a part of Billy as his own shadow. But as I watched him finish his row I knew he couldn’t allow himself to think about how uncertain his livelihood was. To farm a man did have to act like a mule—keep his eyes and thoughts on the ground straight in front of him. If he didn’t he couldn’t keep coming out to his fields day after day.

I walked into the field, stepping on clumps of dirt and weeds Billy’s hoe had turned up. That hoe rose and fell ahead of me, and despite myself it was like the hoe was in my hands, not his. For a few moments I could feel the worn oak handle smooth against my palms, could feel the hoe blade break the soil. Don’t pretend you miss such a life as this, I told myself.

I didn’t speak until he’d finished his row. He turned and found me not five feet behind him. For the first time I wondered if Mrs. Winchester might have spoken the gospel truth, because Billy didn’t act at all surprised to see me.

‘How you doing, Sheriff?’ he said, meeting my eyes.

He didn’t say
What’s the matter
? or
Has something happened
? He spoke as if we’d just bumped into each other in downtown Seneca, not the middle of his tobacco field.

‘I’m looking for Holland Winchester,’ I said, watching his blue eyes. ‘You seen him?’

‘No,’ Billy said.

The eyes can lie, but eventually they’ll tell you the truth.

When Billy said no he glanced at his clenched right hand. I knew what that meant because I’d seen many another man do the same thing in such a situation. That right hand of Billy’s had helped lift rocks from his field big as watermelons. It had helped fell oak trees you couldn’t get your arms around. And maybe, just maybe, that hand had helped hold a shotgun steady enough to kilt a man.

Billy Holcombe was looking for strength.

But I wasn’t going to press him, not yet.

‘Well if you do see him,’ I said, ‘tell him he’s got his momma worried.’

‘I’ll do that, Sheriff.’

Billy wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He was sweating from the hoeing, but I wondered if he had another reason to sweat.